From the course: Design a Newsletter

Create a print-ready PDF - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Design a Newsletter

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Create a print-ready PDF

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- [Instructor] Okay, with our document pre-flighted we have the green light of no errors. We can now make ourselves a print-ready PDF. I'll come to the file menu and choose export and then I can save the document and here I can choose a PDF preset. Now, exactly which one I choose is going to depend upon the requirements of my printer, so the best thing is to call your printer and ask him or her which preset you should use or even if they can supply you with a preset. Let's suppose that they do supply with you a preset, you can come to Adobe PDF presets, define and then you can load the preset that your printer has emailed to you or that you have downloaded from their website but I'm going to use one of the existing presets and that one will be press quality. Another very popular preset is the PDF X-1a:2001 which makes a slightly more dumbed down but more compatible PDF but I'm going to use press quality. And there's not really much that I need to do here but I just want to point out some of the options. View PDF after exporting, I want that checked. I am exporting all pages and I'm exporting them as single pages. In the compression settings, my images if they have an effective PPI or resolution of more than 450 pixels per inch they will be down sampled to 300. And they will all be compressed using the JPEG compression scheme at maximum quality. In my marks and bleed I'm going to leave these turned off but your printer may require you or may prefer you to turn on crop marks, bleed marks, registration marks. You should ask them what is their preference. In the output section we see that the colors will be converted to your destination profile. Your destination profile is something that is chosen in your color settings which is down here at the bottom of the edit menu. It's not something we have time to get into here in this course but there are many courses addressing this topic in the library but to cut a long story short, any RGB colors in the document will be converted to CMYK for printing. In the advanced settings we see that the fonts are being subsetted, so only the characters of the fonts that you are using are sent and this keeps the file size down to a minimum. I'm now ready to export the PDF and we see right here that the PDF is cooking and after a brief delay we should see it open in Acrobat. So, I'll press command or control zero to fit in window and here we have the eight single pages of our newsletter. Note that I have not created spreads, nor have I imposed the pages with the first page next to the last page. That is really the responsibility of the printer but I will show you how to do that in the next movie.

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